None of these exclusive images from Ryan Kwanten’s new film Griff The Invisible really compare to the ones we’ve all seen before such as in this multi-dozen set but he does look pretty cute in his rubber superhero suit. Click on the pix for supersize shots.
Good news for the makers of Griff: the film will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in three weeks time. Director Leon Ford says that his team are “so excited about unleashing our film to the world at such a popular international film festival. The film is a little unusual and something quite different. It’s a super hero movie and it is a comedy, but at its core it’s a simple love story about two very unique individuals finding each other and giving the other the strength to be what they want to be.”
USA, 1986
Director: John Travis
Stars: Brian Estevez, Danny Russo, Gary Owen, Jeff Converse, Jeff Stryker, John Davenport, Michael Gere, Tom Mitchell, Tony Bravo, Tony Marino
In Powertool, Jeff Stryker is is thrown into the County Jail for thirty days for an unspecified offence. Behind bars, he finds that his meaty tool is handy for forming alliances with horny hungry-bottom guards, and scoring joints and cartons of cigarettes. Elsewhere, other inmates pass the time with endless manramming.
Powertool has won wide acclaim and porn classic status, with Catalina releasing a 10th Anniversary special edition DVD and the title regularly appearing on all-time best lists but I found it to be a disjointed film that doesn’t go anywhere near realising its potential. Apart from throwing a few bars and bunks around the set Powertool doesn’t exploit the pressurised sexiness of the prison milieu and while Stryker amuses with his tongue-in-cheek charisma and line delivery, his sex actions are disappointing and the film’s sex highlights occur only when he isn’t around.
Amid all the tumult of The Exorcist, there’s a faint suggestion that Father Karras may have more sources of guilt and torment than the suffering of his sick mother. The tenderness between Fathers Karras and Father Dyer - who removes Karras’ shoes after he passes out drunk in their shared Bert and Ernie dorm, then tearily gives Karras the last rites as he lays in a bloody heap at the bottom of the Georgetown Steps - is a curiously distracting note in this otherwise watertight classic. It’s probably incidental, but two of the epithets Pazuzu uses to torment Karras towards the film’s climax include references to priests shoving their cocks up arses and people sucking cocks in hell (and that’s meant to be a discouragement).
Like all great films, The Exorcist is open to any number of readings and it overflows with rich tributaries of mini-stories that tinker away in our imagination. One thing’s for sure, though: Father Dyer really steals the limelight in the fabulous party scene that is more famous for Linda Blair’s mood-killing appearance when she comes down from her bedroom and pisses all over the floor.
Enjoy the tension right through to 2:11, when Father Dyer (played by Reverend William O’Malley in his only film appearance) who has obviously had more than his regular intake of crème de menthe, jumps onto Ellen Burstyn’s piano and begins to entertain the stragglers not just with some upbeat tunes but with an all-time classic one liner:
“Listen! I don’t need any encouragement, but my idea of heaven is a solid white night club, with me as the head liner, for all eternity - and they love me!”
Exterface’s new exhibition, Apollo, is their typically impressive airbrushed homoerotica, this time based loosely around the Greco-Roman deity who exemplified youthful and athletic male beauty. The model Geoffroy is captured in suitably dramatic poses and the exhibition is interspersed with evocative photos of ravines and rocky scapes.
Not entirely sure then what the Egyptian breast plates are all about, nor the Nubian beads or the Saint Sebastian sub-theme, but it’s as nice to look at as ever. Four more after the jump.
A mini-industry of its own even before the release of Buckleroos Part Two, Buckleroos Part One won 11 GayVN Awards and spawned a feature-length making-of mockumentary (eXposed: The Making of a Legend) which played at g&l film festivals around the world.
Five years after its 2004 release it’s a little hard to see what all the fuss was about as this allegedly “groundbreaking” gay porn film is pretty indistinguishable from innumerable other gay porn flicks set down home on the range such as Muscle Ranch, Farm Hands or even Spokes, which is set in a barnyard.
Everything from Christian Haren’s Marlboro Man to Brokeback Mountain and some of Tom of Finland’s drawings all hang around the same evergreen well of reverent cowboy erotica that Buckleroos drinks at.
You just can’t beat the heat of tight denims, sleeveless checked shirts and that sore-from-the-saddle swagger, topped by a pair of stale-cigarette, bourbon lips, especially if you’re an urban gay guy who dreams of a life more exotic than the one you have at the call centre and the local gay disco. (This may explain why so may guys feel the urge to drape themselves in half a cow’s worth of leather and swing their arms around lasso-style Fri-Sun but that’s another story).
In Buckleroos, a magic belt buckle - wielded by a phantom cowboy clad in top to toe black (Zak Spears in a non-sexual role - like putting Fred Astaire in a non-dancing role) - offers to its wearer the power to fuck whoever they want. Kick (Dean Phoenix) and Jed (Marcus Iron) who have lived together for ten years, but who haven’t had sex with each other since the first night they met. They’re convinced that having sex with the same person twice leads to an irretrievable loss of heat that’s steadily replaced by what they call the “life sentence” of an increasingly platonic partnership.
So instead, they loll about the house jacking off on the couch together while watching selections from their massive gay porn collection, and hitting the local gay bar at night to score some hot ass. The bar in question comes via The Shining, replete with a ghost-host who occasionally takes physical form to lend patrons enchanted sex accessories and who says that he’s been in the hotel “forever” and a cast of half-dead automata who drop their daks and start screwing on the pool table the minute the licensee calls “last drinks”. Continue reading "Marlboro Boys"
All artists have their in-house style, an instantly recognisable sound that links even their most disparate work. You can sense similarities in (for example) Prince’s Little Red Corvette and Kiss even though the former is a full-band rocker delivered with a growl, and the latter is sung in falsetto over a pared down backing of an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. There’s an essence of the artist that informs everything they do and even when the artist goes out of their way to explore different sounds and ideas, they still end up producing something that’s typically them, and fair enough.
But something about Kylie Minogue’s latest single (All The Lovers) has started to bother me. I really like the song, which is nice albeit standard Kylie softshoe/electro dance pop, but All The Lovers is more or less identical to her previous singles I Believe In You (above) and Slow (below). Even the choreography in the videos for each song is similar, and while she is solo in I Believe In You, she dances languorously over semi-catatonic, prostrate dancers in All The Lovers and Slow.
Kylie has never been an artist per se, but, rather, a pop star masterminded by songwriters and marketers (she certainly isn’t alone in this). But all of a sudden, she’s starting to look like a menu item at McDonalds, and this is a little bit of a low-gear change, even from her.
I thought Inception was as boring as batshit, and I wasn’ttheonlyone. The silver lining of sitting through it, though, came in the form of the lovely Tom Hardy, who I don’t think I’ve ever seen on screen before. I never saw Rocknrolla, and the cute Kleenex commercial (below) that he starred in with Bob Geldof et al, only screened in the UK.
He also appeared in TV shows such as The Code and The Virgin Queen and won the Best Actor award at the British Independent Film Awards for his title role in Bronson. Excitingly, he’s playing the lead in the new Mad Max film, due out 2012.
Check out that chest - not to mention the head-giving lips. Tom is like a more dreamily-handsome, succulent version of Jason Statham and there’s more pics and clips after the jump.
The Outrate Online Short Film Festival 2010 is NOW UNDERWAY.
Some lovely entries have already come in and they are screening in the screening rooms, which you can find your way to via the Festival’s opulent Foyer.
The Call For Entries is still very much underway, so if you head to the festival sub-site, you can find out all you need to know.
As always, entry is FREE. Also, all entries are screened for the two months of the festival. Last year, 300,000 people checked out the films, so this is a good chance to get your work out there to a global audience with minimal fuss, and at no expense to you.
The judging panel is as illustrious as ever, with Steve Hayes, the Tired Old Queen At The Movies, as well as Fausto Fernós & Marc Felion, hosts of Chicago’s Feast Of Fun podcast, and last year’s winner, London film maker Nathan Evans part of the team.
The CALL FOR ENTRIES is now on - so please send in your work. Screenings commence 1 July, and winners will be announced 22 August.
Dick Fisk would have turned 55 this week (d.o.b. 13 May 1955) had he not died in a car accident in 1983, while his career was in full swing. That year saw the release of Spokes, the finest gay porn film ever made, and The Other Side of Aspen, another great classic that was released just weeks before Dick’s death.
Fisk exemplified the athletic mo-clone and his performance style was friendly but resolute. He had a very small body of work but made a great impression, especially in Spokes where his dark and hairy baseball-coach physique and Mark Spitz moustache placed him in visual contrast to the rest of the ensemble, who were mostly blond and a few years younger.
This gallery looks back at Dick and the full-nude shots kick off after the jump so don’t click “more” if your manager or office-nemesis is hanging about, waiting for any excuse to call you in for one final meeting. BONUS: fabulous Falcon retro-montage clip at the end where Dick features heavily.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 opus Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom was one of Criterion’s first DVD releases back in 1998, but the title quickly went out of print, and in the decade since, secondhand copies of Salò have sometimes commanded upward of a thousand dollars. But in a way, Salò is a movie that should be distributed under the counter. Pasolini marries the perverse visions of the Marquis de Sade with the decadence of Italy’s fascist era, trapping the audience in a ritzy Italian mansion with an assortment of naked young people and the coolly philosophical aristocrats who torment them. The movie comments on the degradation of the human spirit by subjecting its characters to some of the most nauseating sexual encounters ever simulated on film. Shit is eaten. Tongues are severed, eyeballs are gouged out, genitals burn. In the words of the movie’s authority figures, “All’s good if it’s excessive.”
Salò emerged from an era thick with Eurosleaze, in which drive-ins and arthouses alike programmed “the erotic adventures of so-and-so”—many of those films inspired by Pasolini’s own racy adaptations of The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales. With Salò, Pasolini looked to negate the giggly titillation of the times by reducing the body to a container for foul fluid, and presenting desire as something base and easily manipulated. As the fascist experiment plays out in Salò, the slaves begin to inform on each other, and to take a certain measure of satisfaction in their captors’ attention; meanwhile, those captors keep finding it harder to control their rage, or their dissatisfaction with what they’ve wrought.
Amid the cranked-up whites and hilarious hobby-horse crotch-thrusting is a very young Simon Baker, who was then Simon Denny, dancing shirtless with another guy in the background of this totes timestamped video clip for Australian band Euphoria’s #1 (domestically) hit “Love You Right” (above).
Simon appears from 2:17 and his drugs kick in at 3:28, and also watch for lead vocalist Holly Garnett’s infamous squeal that runs from 2:55 - 3:03.
Spunk-filled lead singer of Euphoria was Andrew Klippel, who came into Joh Bailey for a trim while I was apprenticing there and I got to wash his hair, he was wearing a singlet.
BONUS: More joy after the jump with a young Nicole Kidman appearing in the video clip for Pat Wilson’s “Bop Girl”:
France/Belgium, 2009
Director: Stijn Coninx
Stars: Cecile de France, a million others
For many centuries now there’s been plenty of lesbians in the world (God knows), plenty of nuns (some of whom are lesbians), millions of Belgians (some of whom are lesbians and/or nuns), and more than enough eccentric one-hit-wonder singers who went from number one to oblivion overnight, but you know, there is only one person I can think of who fitted into all four of these categories.
Jeannine Deckers, the sensational Belgian Lesbian Singing Nun of the late 1960s, sold over a half a million copies of her excruciating ditty Dominique soon after Jeannine’s cunt of a Mother Superior showed a rare moment of kindness and allowed Jeannine to record her folk-ish songs - which never failed to get the other nuns to tap their sandals - and sell the album at the convent’s ad-hoc gift store. Here, the record was picked up by a recording company by a music exec. and soon after that, European fame beckoned for Jeannine and for about a year, she was the hottest thing around.
In the old days, trailers didn’t fast-forward through the entire storyline like they tend to do today. Instead, they presented flashes of the action while a portentous voiceover listed the merits of the film including the artists on the soundtrack where applicable, and mentioned the film’s title at least three times.
Before she ditched Cinzano and foundDynasty Joan Collins starred in B-movie adaptations of her sister’s bestselling novels like The Stud (trailer, above) and The Bitch (below). Both show off late-1970s trailer art at its airport-novel best.
Continuing a dire seven days with the deaths of John Forsythe and announcement that Martina Navratilova is battling breast cancer, comes the sad news that Malcolm McLaren has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 64.
Waltz Darling (1989)
McLaren was a pop culture impresario who started with a fashion boutique in early 1970s London with then-girlfriend Vivienne Westwood before moving on to become the manager of The Sex Pistols where he orchestrated publicity stunts such as floating the band down the Thames where they performed their punk song God Save The Queen while moored just off the Houses of Parliament, during the week of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.
Deep In Vogue (1989)
Always keeping on eye on underground urban trends, McLaren hit #3 on the UK singles charts in 1983 with Double Dutch, a song inspired by the double-rope skipping craze popular in poorer parts of US cities and in 1989 released Waltz Darling, an album that fused classical music and motifs from British literature with electro-dance beats. Two of the songs were directly inspired by the then-underground New York dance cult of Vogueing, which Madonna would come to a year after McLaren.
The two songs, Waltz Darling and Deep In Vogue, play in the clips above and later in 1989 McLaren collaborated with Linda Evans’ longtime companion Yanni to create Aria, used as the music for the famous 1989 British Airways advertising campaign and also appearing on McLaren’s 1990 album Round the Outside! Round the Outside! as an extended version.
But it was, perhaps, in 1984 when he seemed to turn away for a moment from trying to spot the next underground trend just before it reached its tipping point that he created his masterpiece, the haunting and timeless Madame Butterfly:
John Forsythe passed away just before Easter after a long battle with cancer and pneumonia, aged 92.
His enduring career in television started in the 1950s and took off once he began his association with Aaron Spelling as the voice of “Charlie” in Charlie’s Angels (including the later big screen adaptations).
Forsythe also had an Alfred Hitchcock connection, starring in The Trouble With Harry (1955) and Topaz (1969) as well as appearing in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its 1960s spin-off The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Also, he was a founding member of the Lee Strasberg acting school and had a long and distinguished presence on the Broadway stage.
But it was Forsythe’s role as Blake Carrington in Spelling’s mega-deluxe supersoap Dynasty that brought Forsythe his greatest fame. In Dynasty, Blake was the patriarch of the filthy rich but intractably dysfunctional Carrington clan, made up of Blake, his second wife Krystle (played by Linda Evans and her windscreen-wiper hairdo) and the adult children he shared with his first wife Alexis, who appeared at the thrilling courtroom finale that closed season one (see below for more on this). As the series went on a next-to-endless list of previously unmentioned sons and daughters, cousins and the entire clan of the Colbys, who Alexis married into, joined the cast.
The show was devised to compete with smash hit Dallas (the series was originally - and briefly - called Oil) and in the underwhelming first season, Blake was continually battling various business rivals and men who wanted a peek at Krystle’s boobs. The show was not a huge success at first, but the moment Alexis (re)appeared on the scene, the show found its style and focus.
Alexis became Blake’s main nemesis, and their never-ending hostilities became the main plot base of the rest of the life of the series. Alexis’ enmity for Blake was driven by their bitter divorce, part of which included a clause where she was never again allowed to see their children (a clause which evaporated somewhere between the divorce and the beginning of season two) and her enduring but well-concealed love for him, which she admitted in season seven when Blake recovered from the amnesia he had been struck with when an oil rig he was inspecting in the South China Seas exploded, and Alexis had to hand back all the contracts and documents she’d gleefully taken ownership of by fooling hospital staff that she was still Blake’s wife - something he had concurred with as while under the influence of his amnesia he could not remember anything before 1964. Under attack from an angry Blake Alexis confessed that part of her strategy was that she had a chance to once again be his loving wife.
But, their egomaniacal competitiveness was beyond debate as their two business empires (his: Denver Carrington, hers: ColbyCo, which she inherited when she married Cecil Colby at his hospital bed seconds before he died) were the two largest corporations in the state of Colorado and were continuously in competition for every major contract and business deal that took place anywhere in the world. Their rivalry went even further such as in season eight when Blake and Alexis ran against each other for election as Governor of Colorado just to spite each other, while at all other times anything from boardroom confrontations, accusations of various murders and mutual strangulation attempts (true) ensued.
Over-the-top Reagan-era glamour was the order of the day, starting with the opening titles (replete with its trilling, dynastic music and images of popping bottles of Champagne and spewing oil derricks, polo ponies and limousines, diamond necklaces, fur coats and so on), continuing with Nolan Miller’s legendary gowns (by season three the budget for each episode of Dynasty exceeded one million dollars) and the completely excessive list of guest stars that included Charlton Heston, Barbara Stanwyck, George Hamilton, ex-president Gerald Ford and most famously, Rock Hudson, whose appearance for a minor romantic subplot with Krystle in the 1984 season became a sensation when it was announced soon after the episode aired that Hudson was suffering from AIDS and that Evans may have been infected by their on-screen kiss.
Camille Paglia has noted that a part of Dynasty’s success was its fusion of daytime soap operas, with their preposterous plot twists and histrionic characters, and the smoky erotica and opulent aesthetic of Golden Age Hollywood, and the combination worked like a dream: for two or three years in the mid 1980s, the show ruled over television. Dynasty was the number one rating program in the United States for 1984 and 1985 and won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series in 1984 (it was nominated every year in that category 1981-1986). For his performance as Blake Carrington, Forsythe won five Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor in a Television Drama and won twice (1983-84) and Linda Evans and Joan Collins each won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Television Drama (in 1982 and 1983, respectively).
Dallas returned fire in 1985 with a Dynasty style season that featured the arrival of former Bond girl Barbara Carerra as a Euro black widow named Angelica Nero who dressed, spoke and acted in a remarkably similar way to Joan Collins as Alexis, trying to bring down JR’s oil empire and killing at least one of her innumerable male lovers by stealthily removing her hat pin and stabbing him in the neck with it and planting a bomb in the Ewing company office building that detonated just as Sue Ellen (Linda Gray) rushed into the building to warn JR (Larry Hagman). Sue Ellen would have certainly died in the explosion, had it not been for the very next scene when Pam (Victoria Principal) awoke to find her husband Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy) was starting the day with a nice warm shower, despite him having being killed in a car accident at the end of the previous season. The subsequent season of Dallas was built on the premise that the entire previous season had been Pam’s dream and the general public and critical reaction to this was that the outlandishness of the supersoaps had gone just one rhinestone too far.
Thus, there was no winner in the war between Dynasty and Dallas and both entered humiliating double-figure positions in the rankings within the next two seasons. By the late 1980s,viewing habits started to swing back towards the anti-glamourous, and when Dynasty was axed in 1989 (ranked #57), the number one show that season was working-class sitcom Roseanne with it’s anti-Alexis lead character.
Anyway, back to John Forsythe and an interesting tidbit: each episode of Dynasty ended in a cliffhanger scene, announced via surging theme music and dramatic freeze-frame. From his decades in the game, Forsythe understood the critical importance of appearing in these scenes, and he had it written into his contract that Blake would appear in every episode’s final scene, for the run of the entire series. This proved to be a most prescient move come season two when Joan Collins quickly and permanently shoulder padded barged her way past Forsythe to become far and away the show’s biggest star to the point that she/Alexis became the embodiment of all that was Dynasty.
Blake and Alexis’ endless sparring was fundamentally archetypal and not a little cartoonish, so it was, I think, the ever-evolving plotline involving Blake’s relationship with his gay son and only male heir Steven who was originally played by the handsome Al Corley (pictured below) which was the most compelling dramatic thread of Blake’s character arc, and the one that gave Forsythe his best opportunities in the series to show off his acting. Continue reading "Gay Scene: Blake Carrington kills Ted Dinard (Dynasty, Season #1)"
The talented Pierre-Yves Monnerville has sent me his latest shoot, featuring a pensive model called Chris, who apparently spends most of his down time hanging out by the light of his lounge room lamp, completely nude.
The endless double entendre of the TV series was jettisoned in no uncertain terms for the 1977 big screen movie ofAre You Being Served, as exemplified in this zany scene where Mr Humphries (the immortal John Inman RIP) fends off the unwanted advances of a burly foreign legion soldier who thinks he is Mrs. Slocombe (the immortal Molly Sugden RIP)
The world’s most boring country has taken a baby step towards doing something partially interesting.
The Malaysian government has given permission for film makers to depict homosexuals in Malaysian films, with the caveat that they denounce their wicked homo ways before the closing titles, or turn straight altogether.
The Malaysian Film Producers’ Association president Ahmad Puad Onah said that “we are now allowed to show [gay] scenes, as long as we portray good triumphing over evil and there is a lesson learnt in the film, such as from a gay (character) who turns into a (straight) man.”
“Previously we are not allowed to show these at all.”
Kissing, undressing and obscenity scenes will still be banned.
“We can do almost anything now but we are urged to give due considerations on the film’s impact on certain areas like public order, religion, socio-culture elements and moral values.”
Bravo! Can’t wait to see the first Malaysian gayby movie to roll into cinemas soon - not.
Did you know The Philippines churns out scores of gay films every year (most of them bad, but anyway)? See some of them here.
So impossibly overgroomed were the members of Army Of Lovers that they managed to look airbrushed, in the flesh.
Exemplars of the peerless genre of Swedish pop-dance - a nation-specific subgenre which includes Aqua and Roxette and makes everything else in the epileptic world of Europop look and sound like Sade Unplugged by comparison - Army Of Lovers burst onto the scene in the late 1980s like an exploding vat of liquid eyeliner to score chart hits with songs like Crucified and King Midas, which I can remember dancing to several times as it was invariably the final song played every Saturday night at DJ Station in Bangkok (the video clip - above - aired on a giant screen that lowered dramatically out of the roof to screams and squeals from many in attendance).
A fascinating trio: former hooker Alexander Bard graduated from the Stockholm School of Economics and now tours the European lecture circuit speaking about the social implications of the interactive revolution, Jean-Pierre Barda (lead singer) is a make-up artist and Rasputin lookalike who has worked for Her Majesty the Queen of Sweden and has hosted television programs like Rik Och Berömd (the Swedish “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”) and Miss Sweden 2002, and Camilla Henemark, who runs her own modelling agency and has left and rejoined the group several times after several well-publicised fights with other members.
Here’s Crucified, which was number one for eight weeks in Europe during 1991:
Here they are performing Crucified live on Russian TV:
When promoting their movie Flex, Falcon Studios asked:
“What goes down in Kane O’Farrell’s Gym? A little bit of working out … and a whole lot of sex!” Now, Kane (aka Jarrett James, a fitness trainer based in London) has unveiled his real-life 3-week workout program. The full instructions are below, and they aren’t for the lethargic. In fact, there’s a whole fucking lot of working out, and no sign whatsoever of any actual fucking.
Jarrett recommends up to 8 meals a day, with not a single one containing any fat, sugar or salt. I’m presuming alcohol is completely banned too, so this regimen is certainly not for me. Oh, and the “3-week” part doesn’t mean that you only have to commit for three weeks to end up looking like the star of Cross Country and Bootstrap. It’s a three week program, repeated every three weeks, for the rest of your days on the earth or until you stop caring about your appearance - whichever comes first.
On the plus side, you do get Thursday and Sunday off, and you can end up looking like this:
It’s 2010 and so the concept of taking responsibility for your sex life has penetrated through the cracks of even the thickest of gay skulls but Barbra, as usual, was way ahead of the game.
You can hear Her point of view on the matter in this typically overwrought scene from 1987’s Nuts, where, as top-shelf call girl Claudia Draper (wtf?) she blindsided her passive lawyer (Richard Dreyfuss) to command the courtroom and convince the judge that she wasn’t Yentlmental.
CLAUDIA: So don’t judge my blowjobs - they’re SANE! I knew what I was doing every goddamn minute and I’m responsible for it. I lift my skirt, I’m responsible. When I go down on my knees I. AM. RESPONSIBLE.
Randy Blue’s king stud Chris Rockway is gorgeous. He’s not the Joey Stefano that he may think he is or that Randy Blue may like him to be, but he’s a charismatic performer whose mechanic’s physique, unique moaning style and tender attention to his eager partners has gotten me over the line on several occasions.
However, he has jazz hands - he does! Just look at these examples, stills from Randy Blue movies he’s appeared in:
Australia, 1971
Director: Ted Kotcheff
Stars: Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Gary Bond, Jack Thompson
Convicts were sent to Australia for the term of their natural life and there was real truth in sentencing in those days. The journey to the ‘land beyond the seas’ took eight months and if they survived that, they could build a colony under the lash and the blistering sun or escape into an endless desert filled with deadly spiders and snakes.
Little has changed in the 200 years since, with 99% of Australians crammed into the fertile coastal slivers on the east and west of the continent, while many British backpackers and the occasional baby never return from ill-fated journeys into the mysterious, vast interior.
Long before Tourism Australia joined forces with film makers and movies like Crocodile Dundee and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert made the Outback cute, the films of the first Australian New Wave like Picnic At Hanging Rock, Wake In Fright and The Last Wave reflected the Outback in all its malevolent glory. Wake In Fright is new to DVD after a surviving print of the ‘lost film’ of Australian cinema was discovered in a recycling container in a Pittsburgh factory in 2004 and given a brief theatrical re-release in Sydney and Melbourne in 2004.
In Wake In Fright John Grant (Gary Bond - Silence of the Lambs fans will note the character name) is serving out a bond to the Department of Education to pay back his teacher training debt by teaching several years in a drab Outback town. Finally granted some Christmas leave, he aims to head for Sydney via the bush plane out of Bundanyabba, a rough as guts place full of hard working, blue-singlet-wearing blokes whose veins run clear with beer.
Grant loses all his savings on a game of Two-Up and falls into a set of threatening misadventures with a violent trio and the alcoholic, slightly mad local doctor known as Doc (Donald Pleasence). After a brutal all-night kangaroo hunt that forced the film makers to add a cruelty to animals message at the beginning of the closing titles Grant and Doc have what appears to be a very drunken male-male sexual encounter.
The poster above for Dunno Y … Na Jaane Kyun (Don’t Know Why) from Indian director Sanjay Sharma is now on display out front of many of India’s countless cinemas in preparation for its May release in a country where even heterosexual kissing is considered taboo (just ask Shilpa Shetty, the Indian actress whose career almost ended immediately amid public furor about obscenity when Richard Gere kissed her on the lips at an AIDS fundraiser in New Delhi in 2007).
India’s High Court overturned laws against homosexuality last year.
“At the moment I’m not thinking about any political or censor problems,” Sharma told BBC Asian Network.
The movie has already been nicknamed “India’s Brokeback Mountain” which may be a good thing or not, but controversy is sure to ensue when the film opens since gay life and gay relationships are not really publicly discussed or treated by the Indian media.
However, “I’m not afraid of anything,” Sharma said. “I stand by my conviction.”
The film stars Maradona Rebello, below, who previously starred in Pankh, which introduced a couple of gay characters to Indian moviegoers but didn’t feature anything like the explicit sex and kissing scenes in the upcoming Dunno Y.
The ultimate motherfucker, Norman Bates debuted 50 years ago in Psycho (1960) a film that still, today, finds its only real competition in the three other films that came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Navratilova-like run of form that started with Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959 and ended with The Birds in 1963.
With thanks to my friend Dick (not quite his real name), I discovered this unique gay porn scene.
In it, a cute young blond wishes his clown/mime sex fantasy into life when a gyrating guy wearing heavy pancake makeup appears from a cloud of helium balloons to strip, suck and fuck (without taking any of his makeup off. And, he uses his clown facial expressions and mime hand movements throughout).
Both guys are quite hot and the mime especially has a really nice dick but I’ve never found mimes or clowns sexy in the slightest and my mind just goes off into so many different places here. The creepy milieu with its carnival paraphernalia and a lurking masked man gyrating to metronomic synthesizer/drum-machine music is like something you’d find deep inside Buffalo Bill’s house in The Silence of the Lambs, and while the younger guy is reminiscent of Morten Harket from A-Ha, the clown guy looks a little too much like Madonna in her True Blue period (especially in the sequence 8:08 - 9:05) and this is, of course, very distracting.
I’d also like to know what he uses on his lips to not have any of his black lipstick rub off onto his partner’s cock or arse despite providing an extended period of rimming and head:
My darling/s is/are back with a look at Bette Davis’ role in The Letter which Steve Hayes rightfully believes should have won Davis the 1940 Best Actress Oscar (which would have been her third). As always, Steve runs us through a kaleidoscopic mini-encyclopaedia on Davis and The Letter before dropping into character as Davis herself - it’s just great.
Alas, Davis lost that year’s Oscar to Ginger Rogers, who as everyone knows gave her best performance not in Kitty Foyle for which she won but in Vivacious Lady which peaks with this scene:
The 
Amid the cranked-up whites and hilarious hobby-horse crotch-thrusting is a very young Simon Baker, who was then Simon Denny, dancing shirtless with another guy in the background of this totes timestamped video clip for Australian band Euphoria’s #1 (domestically) hit “Love You Right” (above).
In the old days, trailers didn’t fast-forward through the entire storyline like they tend to do today. Instead, they presented flashes of the action while a portentous voiceover listed the merits of the film including the artists on the soundtrack where applicable, and mentioned the film’s title at least three times.
John Forsythe passed away just before Easter after a long battle with cancer and pneumonia, aged 92.
Alexis’ enmity for Blake was driven by their bitter divorce, part of which included a clause where she was never again allowed to see their children (a clause which evaporated somewhere between the divorce and the beginning of season two) and her enduring but well-concealed love for him, which she admitted in season seven when Blake recovered from the amnesia he had been struck with when an oil rig he was inspecting in the South China Seas exploded, and Alexis had to hand back all the contracts and documents she’d gleefully taken ownership of by fooling hospital staff that she was still Blake’s wife - something he had concurred with as while under the influence of his amnesia he could not remember anything before 1964. Under attack from an angry Blake Alexis confessed that part of her strategy was that she had a chance to once again be his loving wife.
The endless double entendre of the TV series was jettisoned in no uncertain terms for the 1977 big screen movie of 
The world’s most boring country has taken a baby step towards doing something partially interesting.
So impossibly overgroomed were the members of Army Of Lovers that they managed to look airbrushed, in the flesh.
It’s 2010 and so the concept of taking responsibility for your sex life has penetrated through the cracks of even the thickest of gay skulls but Barbra, as usual, was way ahead of the game.
The ultimate motherfucker, Norman Bates debuted 50 years ago in Psycho (1960) a film that still, today, finds its only real competition in the three other films that came out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Navratilova-like run of form that started with Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959 and ended with The Birds in 1963.
My darling/s is/are back with a look at Bette Davis’ role in The Letter which Steve Hayes rightfully believes should have won Davis the 1940 Best Actress Oscar (which would have been her third). As always, Steve runs us through a kaleidoscopic mini-encyclopaedia on Davis and The Letter before dropping into character as Davis herself - it’s just great.